Quotes of the Day

In his 1928 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, Spanish director Luis Buñuel shocked audiences with a shot of a razor slicing into a woman's eyeball. More recently, another Spanish filmmaker found less violent ways to open people's eyes to his creative vitality. Oscar-winner Pedro Almodóvar rejected what he saw as Spain's fascist, homophobic and bogusly pious cinematic conventions to make free-spirited films that celebrate sex and skewer taboos. His blend of passion, pain, carnal humor and camp melodrama — what the Spanish call Almodóvarismo — led to a string of successes: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All About My Mother. By the time he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 2002's Talk to Her, Almodóvar was the world's best-known Spanish director — without ever making a film in English. He changed the way Spain sees itself: women were respected more, homosexuals feared less, men were more comfortable with their own sensitivity and imperfection.

Where Almodóvar led, others are following. Julio Medem's Sex and Lucía — starring the luminous Paz Vega as a waitress who falls madly in love, then thinks her boyfriend has died — celebrates a free and easy eroticism. With Goya winner Take My Eyes, Icíar Bollaín shines a light on domestic violence and raises the profile of Spain's female filmmakers. And in The Others, Alejandro Amenábar's English-language debut starring Nicole Kidman, earthly mysticism drives a tense horror tale. By taking Almodóvar's path, these three very different directors are finding a global audience. And Spanish film is giving a boost to Latin America — over half of Spain's co-productions in 2002 involved at least one Latin American country. Almodóvar's latest, Bad Education, stars Mexican up-and-comer Gael García Bernal.

Spanish accents are becoming more common in front of the camera, too. When a young Antonio Banderas abandoned his star status in Spain to phonetically memorize English dialogue in 1992's The Mambo Kings, he opened a door: Penélope Cruz pouting her way through Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Vanilla Sky; blue-eyed bad boy Jordi Mollà keeping up with Johnny Depp in 2001's Blow. But Javier Bardem, 35, with his boxer's face and poet's eyes, is making the biggest mark of all — he has six movies opening in the next two years. Just don't ask him to play Spanish stereotypes. "When I go outside of Spain, sometimes directors ask me to play the role of the typical Hispanic icon and I always refuse," he says. "It's not about vanity or ego, it's about having fun. And I'm not having fun doing that, it's too schematic." Instead, Bardem (a third-generation actor) prefers meaty roles with lots of conflict and a touch of controversy. He's played a basketball player in a wheelchair in Live Flesh; a homosexual poet persecuted in 1960s Cuba in Before Night Falls, a turn that earned him the first Best Actor Oscar nomination for a Spaniard; and in Out to Sea, which premieres later this year, a 55-year-old quadriplegic fighting for the right to die. Bardem's ability to inhabit difficult roles led El Pais readers to vote him the best Spanish actor of the past decade.

Unlike Banderas and Cruz, Bardem can act in English as well as Spanish — for proof, look at Before Night Falls or John Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs. "When you're acting in your own language, you're attached to millions of images of your own life," he says. "When you're working in a foreign language, you feel detached. It's more fun because you can be braver and play more. Actors are just little kids looking for a daddy and mommy in every director. So when we call ourselves 'artists,' I say let's have some respect for that word. An artist is someone who creates something beautiful, deep and profound out of nothing. I truly believe that in some of the best actors and actresses you see the sculpture of the human soul."

Bardem isn't relying on the popularity of Spanish cinema to carry his career. "It's a fashion movement. And with every fashion movement, there are fake elements. The way that people outside Spain think Spaniards are, how we look, how we act — that's an icon. What Spain has is a strong sense of the past, and that's not going to disappear, it doesn't belong to any fashion. That's what's going to survive through this wave of icons."

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• From Bardem to Bollaín, Spanish actors and directors are making films the whole world wants to see